May 23 (Bloomberg) -- Sherritt International Corp., a
Canadian mining and energy company with operations on four
continents, is considering options including selling assets or
restructuring the business to improve its value.

“That’s what we are spending our time on now,” Chief
Executive Officer David Pathe said in an interview after the
Toronto-based company’s annual shareholder meeting today. “It’s
made more challenging in this kind of commodity-price
environment to try and demonstrate what we think true value of
assets is.”

Pathe is seeking to boost the company’s shares, which have
fallen 11 percent in the past year, even after it started
producing finished metal from the $5.5 billion Ambatovy nickel
and cobalt operation in Madagascar. Sherritt dropped 1.3 percent
to C$4.68 at the close in Toronto.

Sherritt may be hurt by the number of businesses it’s in
around the globe, the CEO said. In addition to producing nickel,
the company sells power in Cuba, mines coal in Canada, has oil
and natural gas assets in Pakistan and Spain and collects
royalties from other operations.

“Our complexity hurts us, our different businesses in
different locations makes it a harder story to tell,” Pathe
said. “We can do any number of things, whether it’s sales and
refocusing the business or restructuring ourselves in some way,
there’s an infinite number of options.”

Pathe’s approach makes sense, said Raymond Goldie, a
Toronto-based analyst at Salman Partners Inc. who rates the
shares a buy.

Net Value

“The market typically, for a very diversified play, trades
at two-thirds of its net-asset value,” Goldie said in an
interview. “A pure play trades at 100 percent of its net-asset
value.”

Sherritt also sees opportunities for acquisitions, as the
world’s biggest miners pursue sales and cut back on project
spending, Pathe said. Sellers of assets outnumber buyers, he
said, as a record amount of mining assets are put up for sale by
companies including BHP Billiton Ltd. this year.

“Today you can buy assets for less than you can build
them,” Path said at the meeting. “That creates tremendous
opportunities.”

He declined to comment on specific assets Sherritt is
interested in.

“If we could find what we thought was the right
opportunity for us, an asset that we could run and run well, if
we could find a way to finance it ourselves or with partners, we
would absolutely look at that,” he said in the interview.

Company Chairman Ian Delaney didn’t stand for re-election
at today’s meeting and said the board intended to elect Harold
Stephen to replace him as chairman. Delaney, who retired as CEO
last year, was at Sherritt and its predecessor companies for
more than two decades. Twenty-three years “is enough,” Delaney
said at the meeting today.